Bee Season(movie) explores the Krishna faith

11-07-2005, 12:37 PM

Bee Season' explores the Krishna faith
.... mother Miriam's (Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche) own path is tied to the
ancient study, Eliza's older brother Aaron (Max Minghella) explores the
Krishna faith. ...
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/m...414962.story?c
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Bee Season' a swirl of spelling and mysticism

By Robert K. Elder
Tribune staff reporter

Words speak to Eliza Naumann.

In a spelling bee, her connection to words is almost mystical. Letter by
letter, words come alive and reveal themselves to her. She's asked to spell
"dandelion" and the word floats up around her in a computer-generated swirl,
each letter a different part of the ghostly flower.

In "Bee Season," an adaptation of Myla Goldberg's novel by directing team
Scott McGehee and David Siegel, mysticism and spelling bees make strange
bedfellows.

Religious studies professor Saul (Richard Gere) suspects his daughter Eliza's
(newcomer Flora Cross) gift for spelling may tie into his graduate work on
Kabbalah, an ancient branch of Jewish mysticism. Believing that words have
power and the right words can unlock the key to the divine, Saul and his
daughter explore the secrets of Kabbalah.

"Bee Season" hits theaters Friday at the height of Kabbalah's pop culture
exposure, when celebs such as Madonna, Britney Spears, Demi Moore and Ashton
Kutcher have made it a Hollywood buzzword.

So saturated has Hollywood become with the practice that director Steven
Soderberg, a longtime friend of McGehee and Siegel's, even takes a playful
potshot at Kabbalah in "Ocean's 12." In that movie, Topher Grace, playing a
spoiled version of himself, rips off a Kabbalah red string bracelet that is
supposed to ward off the "evil eye" and screams, "It's almost as if this
Kabbalah crap doesn't even work!" after some romantic problems.

But, director Siegel said, the movie isn't a recruiting poster for Kabbalah.
It is about the universal search for spirituality, he said.

Basics of Kabbalah

"We hoped that the spiritual aspects of the story, that people could identify
them without being Jewish," Siegel said on a recent visit to Chicago with
directing partner McGehee. "We tried to concentrate on the simpler ideas of
Kabbalah and create a spiritual [foundation]."

Not all of the religious ideas in "Bee Season" belong to Kabbalah. Though
mother Miriam's (Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche) own path is tied to the
ancient study, Eliza's older brother Aaron (Max Minghella) explores the
Krishna faith.

The directors felt it important to treat the Hare Krishna characters in the
movie with respect, perhaps one of the few times the faith hasn't been treated
as a punch line (remember David Leisure, a.k.a. Joe Isuzu, in "Airplane"?).

"The Hare Krishnas get a bad knock," Siegel said. "They're really just a
branch of Hinduism basically, and they believe in making their presence felt
so that people might join in their experience."

To add authenticity to some religious sequences, Krishna devotees in the Bay
Area participated in scenes in which Aaron leaves his family for a Krishna
center.

Like Siegel and McGehee's previous features "Suture" (1993) and "The Deep End"
(2001), "Bee Season" attempts to make sense of fractured family dynamics.

Eliza's study of Kabbalah and ascent to the National Spelling Bee in
Washington, D.C., complicate the issue, as the competition becomes intertwined
with family expectations.

Cross said conversations on set weren't tied to Kabbalah, but rather parental
relationships. Saul sees his daughter's spelling bee trances as her communing
with an aspect of divinity.

"I understand it that Eliza wants to make her father proud, and what would
make him proud is that she be closer to god," Cross said.

Balancing these two aspects was a key component to Siegel and McGehee's
telling of the story.

Tilda Swinton, star of "The Deep End," once described the directing pair as
"one brain, two bodies," an assessment that 12-year-old Cross agrees with.

"It's really strange how they work," Cross said in a recent phone interview.
"David is the one that really works with the actors, and Scott is the one that
really looks at the monitor and says, `Maybe we should do . . . '"

Spurring on

In person, however, the pair don't finish each other sentences as much as they
spur each other to expand or complete a thought.

"I think Kabbalah is part of the zeitgeist, because there's something about
that yearning to feel connected to something beyond us," Siegel offered. "But
why Kabbalah?" McGehee countered. "I don't know what it is about Kabbalah and
our time that has resonated."

"I'm just surprised that anything Jewish could actually become mainstream,"
Siegel responded.

"There's something about its universality that opens it up to people, I
think," McGehee said.

After a moment, Siegel added: "I don't think it's that confusing. It's like
yoga and meditation: Kabbalah is just one more thing that people have grabbed
onto. It's got a celebrity cachet, but it does seem like it's just one of many
things that are on the rise that are trying to connect to a different kind of
spirituality that isn't couched so much directly in a particular
faith."Neither director considers himself religious.

"I keep jokingly telling people that I was raised Californian," McGehee said.

Siegel identifies himself as Jewish, though his family was never
"super-religious," he said. Recently, however, Siegel has taken to simple
meditations in the mornings and afternoon.

A big influence

"It's certainly had a big influence, doing meditation," Siegel says. "I don't
have a teacher or anything. I just do counting meditations; they've been good
for me."

But Siegel's always had an intimate relationship with numbers.

"You also have an incredible serial memory," McGehee says. "He's like a
Rolodex; it's faster to ask David for a phone number that to look it up."

Does this talent carry over into spelling? He never really thought about it.

"When I spell, I really see words," Siegel said. "Like this little girl. . . .
A year and a half working on this movie, and I've never really thought about
that connection. I really do see the letters. I don't spell by memory."

When she competes, Eliza enters a trancelike state, during which the directors
insert magical, computer-animated words that unfold for Eliza, to illustrate
the way she experiences her talent. There's nothing mystical about Siegel's
spelling however.

Siegel said: "It's really bizarre, but it's no profound thing. I just see the
letter in Courier font."

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